Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Attacking the problem areas: painting (inside) kitchen cabinets

Maybe it's a sign I don't have enough to do when I start painting the inside of my kitchen cabinets. In heels. 30 minutes before leaving for work. It's also a product of being up, worked out, and showered before Matt leaves that gives us an early start to the day.

The prep work was pretty easy, empty shelves (more than once because this was spread out over a week and I wouldn't be able to tolerate all the dishes stacked on our dining table for that long), remove black shelf liners, and scrape off contact paper liner with a razor blade (that I feel like is from the 60s but that's a wild guess).

Since I knew I'd be recovering the bottoms with contact paper I wasn't real concerned about their state while scraping. I nicked them often and tore them up while trying to get all the paper up.

I also didn't waste time with getting all the sticky goop off because, again, they would be covered.

Once the contact paper was all off and I did a quick spray with vinegar and wiped them down. That was my cleaning. Then I did one coat of primer and two of paint almost everywhere (the bottoms only got one coat of paint). I was a little disappointed that two total coats wouldn't do the job but the coats were pretty quick and since I was still using the same paint brush (and primer and paint) from my hope chest project, just sealing it in a gallon ziplock between coats, it was easy clean-up.

I got all 3 coats of paint/primer up in less than 24 hours and, after I got home from work, got the shelves lined and put back together.

It was a huge difference!

I thought about moving the big plates to a different shelf since we rarely use them but I like having the whole matching set on one shelf so they got to stay (for now).

Most of Luke's plates and bowls are from the same line (from Target, obviously) so they stack nicely. I picked up quite a few on Valentine's Day clearance and they aren't obviously holiday themed. I think I've gotten good at maximizing clearance shopping for him.

We use the plastic cups on the right for our every day, we're fancy like that. Luke has a few different "bobbies" (his name for his sippies) he rotates through. We won the glasses in the middle at a London puz quiz night. It's one of my favorite random memories from that trip and I'm glad we actually did it, which we had to be talked into by the host. Good reminder to embrace the unexpected when traveling! (And always, for the most part.)

We also did a little more purging while putting it back together which is one of the biggest benefits to this whole process, and why I keep repeating it all over the house. The fresh white backdrop makes me want to keep things clean and open, not all cluttered. We still have too many cups, possibly even enough to provide drinks to both our families at once, but we couldn't agree on any more
to toss (he says my flamingo ones, I say his bug one, among others). And this cupboard has majorly cleared up over the last year as I keep getting pickier and pickier about what gets prime space.

Altogether, I probably spent less than 4 hours on this, most of that scraping up the contact paper. I've already picked out which cupboard is next (the one over the stove) and know most of the rest will follow at some point. But I told Matt not to let me paint the big, bottom, corner cupboard. I don't even know how I could paint that without crawling completely inside it and even I'm not that crazy. But all the rest...they will happen. I find it oddly exciting.

Ending with a good before and after (there were some things in the dishwasher for both of these, but pretty much all things that stack on a current pile):